Salman Khan wears sunglasses at night during a scene in Ready that lasts just long enough for you to wonder if his cornea was bothering him or if someone simply forgot to shout cut before the sun went down. It is a small thing, but it bugged me more than the logic gaps involving property deeds and fake uncles. Hindi cinema has survived worse wardrobe choices, obviously, but there is a distinct kind of laziness in how this particular star vehicle tosses narrative continuity out the window the second a brass section kicks in. Anees Bazmee directs like a man who just inherited a warehouse full of colored smoke and extras in tuxedoes, shoving everyone from Paresh Rawal to Arya Babbar into frames that look less like a constructed world and more like a crowded wedding buffet where nobody knows whose uncle is paying for the paneer. The screenplay operates on a logic where two warring families can be brought together through an elaborate, multi-layered deception involving actors hired to play long-lost relatives, a trope that was already feeling dusty when Priyadarshan was recycling it for twenty different regional remakes back in the nineties.

Asin does what she can with a character written primarily to stand in front of pastel doors and look exasperated while Salman drops one-liners that land with the heavy thud of a wet sack of cement. Her comic timing, which saved some of her earlier southern hits from drowning in melodrama, here gets reduced to a recurring shtick about faking personality disorders that stopped being funny somewhere during the mid-eighties television era. The supporting cast floats in and out of the periphery like ghosts at a feast, with Sanjay Dutt and Arbaaz Khan dropping by for cameos that feel phoned in from the green room of an entirely different production. Kangna Ranaut appears briefly, looking like she wandered onto the wrong soundstage and decided to stay for the craft services, her brief moments on screen carrying a weird, coiled intensity that feels entirely out of place in a movie where the primary dramatic conflict involves a suitcase full of counterfeit cash mistaken for wedding presents. That contrast is actually the most interesting thing about the whole enterprise, even if it was completely accidental.

The cinematography by Sameer Arya suffers from that high-gloss, digital sheen that makes every outdoor location in Bangkok and Mumbai look like a real estate brochure for a gated community nobody actually lives in. Colors are cranked up until the reds bleed and the blues look radioactive, turning even a casual conversation in a park into an assault on the optic nerve. Then there is the soundtrack, composed by a rotating committee of hit-makers who seem to have raided their own old hard drives for leftover beats from Dabangg, resulting in tracks that blur together into a singular, high-bpm wall of synthesized dhol loops and autotuned caterwauling. It is loud, insistent, and deployed at moments of such minor narrative consequence that you start to suspect the sound mixer was operating the faders entirely by rolling dice.

Hindi movies of this vintage often rely heavily on the benevolent patriarch trope, and Paresh Rawal spends a good half-hour looking like he would rather be doing literally anything else than deliver exposition about ancestral lands and sibling rivalry. He manages to squeeze a drop of genuine weariness out of lines that should be completely dead on arrival, though, which is more than can be said for the younger actors who just shout their punches and sprint through dialogue blocks as if a fire alarm is ringing off-camera. The ideology baked into these mainstream Hindi films is remarkably conservative while pretending to be an anarchic family comedy, constantly assuring the audience that disobedience is fine as long as you eventually submit to the wisdom of elders who control the bank accounts. When the credits finally roll over a massive dance sequence featuring half the supporting cast in matching turquoise waistcoats, there is a distinct sensation of having sat through a very long commercial for a lifestyle nobody actually wants to live.